Sins of a Solar Empire is an incredibly robust RT4X strategy game that allows you to grow your empire and conquer the galaxy. Games can last hours, weeks or even months. To start you off, Sins comes with dozens of pre-built maps, 3 sizes of randomized maps and a sophisticated in-game map generator that lets you define virtually every aspect of a map. Set your preferred planets, stars, distances etc and have the game automatically generate a map based on your choices. You can even share and distribute the map to friends, either via the Sins of a Solar Empire site, or directly in online multiplayer matches.

Unfortunately, the in-game designer doesn't give you complete control. You can't choose, for example, where you want a planet to be placed, or what you want it to connect to. You can't set how many militia forces are stationed there, or whether or not it's a homeworld, or if it's a pirate base. If you want to hand-craft your map, the in-game tools won't meet your needs.

Galaxy Forge is the answer to that problem. Part of the Forge Tools suite used by Ironclad Games to develop content for Sins of a Solar Empire, Galaxy Forge is a map editor tool that allows you to place stars, planets, travel lanes and more. You can build a map to your exact specifications. Do you want a multistar map with strategic choke points and no pirate base? No problem, just create it in Galaxy Forge and load it in the game. Galaxy Forge is a WYSIWYG editor, so placing planets, phase lanes, stars and more is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse.

While Galaxy Forge is incredibly easy to use for the amount of control it gives you, it's not fully an end-user-friendly tool. So, to get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible creating great maps to share with the community, I've created this short guide to building a complete map from start to finish..

WARNING: The editor has no undo feature, so be careful when you move elements or make any changes. Save early and often to make sure you don't accidentally delete something you've spent hours tweaking and customizing.

Getting Started with Galaxy Forge

Galaxy Forge is a stand-alone tool that does not use the main game to run. So you can install this on virtually any machine, even that old Pentium III you have stashed in the closet.

To start, make sure you have the Galaxy Forge tool downloaded to your PC. You can get a copy of the tools from the Sins of a Solar Empire website on the Downloads Page.

Once you've downloaded and extracted the tool, open up Galaxy Forge.exe. You will be greeted by the following screen (pictured right). When you start the Galaxy Forge tool, you begin with a default map already setup with the following:

One Star set to random color

Two terran home planets

Two default players (NewPlayer0 and NewPlayer1)

Before you get started adding planets, phase lanes and more stars, you probably want to decide if this is going to be a 2,4,6,8 or 10 player map.

To modify the number of players in your game, go to the Edit menu and select "Players..."

That will open up the Player editor tool. On a new map, you already have NewPlayer0 and NewPlayer1. Even if you want to make a two player map, you'll probably still want to edit the names of the players. Select a player from the left, and all of their editable options will appear in the box on the right.

For this simple guide, we'll focus on the following options:

Design Name - Name your race. This will be how the race is referenced in the editor only.

InGameName - The name of the race as displayed in-game if it belongs to the AI

StartingCredits - How many credits the player starts the game with.

StartingCrystal - How much crystal the player starts the game with.

StartingMetal - How much metal the player starts the game with.

I am going to stick with a simple two player map, and name the first player "Alcari Crusaders" and the second player "Vor Syndicate" and I'll leave them both with the default starting resources.

Naming Your Map & Filling in The Details

Now that you have a new map with your starting players setup, lets start to configure the big-picture details for the map. Click somewhere in the black space of the map to bring up the galaxy details in the settings panel on the right. This is where you'll make some default changes about your map and how the editor works. Defaults These are basic settings for new planets, players and stars that are added to the map.

New Planet Type - The default planet type for any new planet you add to the map.

New Player Starting Credits/Metal/Crystal - The starting resources assigned when you add a new player to the map.

New Star Radius - The radius of any new star system added to the map

I'm going to leave these as my defaults for this tutorial map. Display The options for how the map is displayed in the map selection screen within Sins of a Solar Empire.

Browse Description - Description of your map. Put a line or two about the map, lore etc. This is the creative description players will read in the map browser.

Browse Picture - The icon associated with your designed map in the map browser. This image should be a .tga file and placed in the Textures directory where you installed Sins of a Solar Empire.

For my tutorial map, I'm going to use the description "An example map created to go along with the Galaxy Forge guide"

For Browse Picture, I'm going to be lazy and just take one of the existing scenario images and reuse that. In this case I'll use: ScenarioPicture-Fulcrum (found in \Textures\ScenarioPicture-Fulcrum.tga)

Edit

These are settings to edit how the editor works with scrolling and zooming and shows your current zoom level. These settings will not impact the map itself.

Galaxy

These are some overall game settings for your map. They will impact how the game plays.

Is First Capital Ship Free - Sets whether or not the first capital ship is free for players to purchase.

Planet Artifact Density - Value 0-100. Controls what percentage of planets will have artifacts on them.

Planet Bonus Density - Value 0-100. Controls what percentage of planets will have bonuses on them

Players - How many players have been added to the map (this number is based off of the Player editor)

Recommended Players - Set what kind of game(s) the map is best suited for (i.e. solo, 2v2, 4v4, FFA etc.)

Scale - Controls how big the galaxy is. Large values will spread out your galaxy more.

To set the Recommended Players, click on the field, and you'll see a [...] button on the right. Click on that to bring up the Galaxy Scenario Game Type window.

By default, this is empty. Click "Add" and a new game type will be added. By default it's set to "Solo". However, if you select the item from the left, on the right you can change the type from a drop-down menu.

You can add multiple types if you have a large map you feel would work well for multiple configurations of players. A map designed for 10 players for example could be set for Solo, FFA, 5v5, 2v2v2v2v2 to fill all spots.

For the tutorial map, I think I'll leave the first capital ship as free, but bump up the % of planets with artifacts from the default 15 to 50 (I want this to be a rich map), but I'll leave the bonus density alone. I'm also going to designate my map as a solo only map since it's just two players.

Home Planet

These are the default settings for any planet you designate as a homeworld in your game. Setting any of these to 10 locks it, preventing the player from upgrading it further.

Exploration - How much of the planet has been explored. You explore planets to discover artifacts and planet bonuses.

Infrastructure - How much infrastructure the planet starts with. Building this up helps defend your planet against bombardment

Logistical - How much logistical infrastructure the planet starts with. Logistics limit the number of orbital structures you can place around a planet.

Population - How much population support your planet starts with. This limits how many people can live on a planet.

Tactical - How much tactical infrastructure your planet starts with. This limits the number of defense placements you can build around a planet.

For the tutorial map, I'm going to leave these alone. Ok, we have successfully configured all the meta details for our map. We've set description, picture, game type and messed with the distribution of artifacts. Now that all of the fluff details are out of the way, it's time to get down to the business of making the map!

Making the Map: Adding Planets, Stars and Phase Lanes

Ok, now for the fun part, actually drawing out the game map! For this part you'll be focusing almost exclusively on the map window, instead of the details window like the previous section. Here you'll place, move and connect up all the planets and stars you want to add to your map.

To start, lets look at our map as it stands

We have one star, two home worlds on opposite ends of the system, and that's it. There isn't even a phase lane connecting anything so if you loaded this map right now, you wouldn't be able to travel anywhere. The planets were auto-assigned to the two players we edited earlier.

Before we get started editing the map, there are a few controls that will make life much easier when trying to move around the map:

Panning The Map - Hold the middle mouse button and drag in any direction.

Zooming in and out - Scroll Wheel. When zooming in, it will center on wherever your mouse cursor is.

Now that that's out of the way, lets add a planet! There are two ways to do this:

Double-click anywhere within the radius of the star

Right-click anywhere within the radius of the star and select "Add Planet"

The planet added will have the default settings you defined when you were tweaking the overall map settings. So for this tutorial, it will auto-place a Terran planet.

I'm going to place a handful of planets around the map....

So now that I have all of my planets laid out approximately where I want them, it's time to connect them all together. To do this, right click on any planet, select "Add Connection" and then left click on the planet you want to connect with. Now let me connect up all of my planets...

At this point I have a fully functional game map. I could save this, load it up in the game and play it, but it would be a little bit boring considering all I have are Terran type planets, no pirates and just one other player to fight.

Editing Planets, Stars & Making Things Interesting

Every planet object on my map right now are terran planets with nothing special about them. We also have a star with the color set to random. Oh, and we haven't named a single planet, the star, or anything. Sure it's a technically complete map, but it just doesn't feel right. Here's a snapshot of the map loaded in the game:

The game will automatically name planets and stars you don't name, so technically you don't have to worry about that detail, but there's a lot more you probably want to tweak and fiddle with.

First off, having a few dozen Terran planets just doesn't look right. This is space, and habitable M class worlds are supposed to be rare right? Well, lets change things up a bit. To start with, we'll select the planet directly below the Vor Syndicate's home world.

For editing the planet, you're going to be focusing on the details panel again.

Advanced

SpawnProbability - The chance that a planet exists in the game. 1 means always, 0 means never. You can set the value between the two for a % chance.

StartingUpgradeForArtifact - Controls what level of artifact upgrade the planet starts with

UseDefaultTemplate - Do you want to use the predefined planet template for this planet? This just gives you the standard structures and resources if it's an owned world, or if it's an empty planet occupied by militia.

Misc

Position - The X,Y coordinates of the planet on your map. Only edit these if you want very precise planet placement.

Name

Design Name - The name of the planet as displayed in the Galaxy Forge

InGame Name - What you want the planet to be named in the game.

Ownership

IsHomePlanet - Is this a homeworld?

Owner - Which player owns the planet at the start of the game.

Properties

Type - What type of planet do you want this to be? Terran, Ice, Gas Giant etc.

For a quick-and-dirty map, the only field you really have to play with is "Type" in the properties section. From there you can select any standard planet type programmed into the game. I will now go around my map, changing up the planet types to give me a slightly more interesting map to play on.

I now have a map with volcanic, ice, desert and terran planets. Various asteroids, Plasma & Magentic Storms, even a Pirate Base. This map pretty much covers everything and if you want to just do the basics to build a map that is playable with default settings, you're done. Just save the file and hand it out to your friends, or upload it to the Sins of a Solar Empire website for everyone to download.

There's a lot more under the covers that you can play with and tweak, but this guide was just meant to get your feet wet and familiarize you with the basic, bare-minimum steps needed to make a map.

And always remember you can open any map that comes with the game in Galaxy Forge to see exactly how Ironclad built each of the maps, what special options they used etc. It's perfectly alright to borrow heavily from great maps when you're trying to figure out how to get a planet to start with a specific artifact, or to give players a quick start by giving them a handful of ships to start out with.

Like with every mod tool, there are a handful of "gotchas" or places that aren't quite clear enough. As people encounter problems/ask for help, we'll update this FAQ section with questions and answers we think everyone should know about when using the Galaxy Forge.

I tried to load the map in my game, but I immediately get a victory/defeat screen after loading. What's going on?Make sure you save the galaxy file in the Galaxy folder wherever you installed Sins of a Solar Empire (i.e. c:\Program Files\Stardock Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Galaxy). Do NOT save it in your local settings/app data directory. Maps created with Galaxy forge will not load properly from that folder.

1. Is there any way to copy/paste planets? I want to make a symmetrical map and so it would be much easier to build my planets and then copy/paste them to the other areas, changing the homeworld owners alone.

2. Any chance of getting a description of all the planet types? What, exactly, is the difference between Random and RandomTrue for instance.

That's all for now, thanks for the guide.

EDIT: 1 more quick question

3. Is there any way to set it up so that each star system is guarenteed 1 wormhole in a random location? I want to put 5 uncolonizables on the edge of each star and have 1 be a wormhole leading to another system, is that possible (I know that I need to look in one of the other maps for the wormhole to another system, I'm asking about forcing there to be exactly 1 of a certain type per star)?

I created a galaxy with the Forge and saved it to where I installed Sins. Started Sins but the map doesn't appear in the game. Figured I forgot something so I went back to the Forge and double-checked everything. That's when I noticed that my custom galaxy doesn't exist in Windows Explorer. I did a search for the file but recieved no hits but the Forge shows me my galaxy and loads it find. Any ideas?

The game seems to be setup where there are say four suns with like 10 planets around each sun? (I do not have the game, thinking about buying it)

My question is, can a map be made with 20 stars and 2-3 planets around each star?Or 50 stars with planets only around 1/3rd of them, so there would be alot of planetless stars.

As far as I can tell you can make a tremendous variety of star systems with the Galaxy Forge map editor. I thought I had read somewhere where there had to be at least 1 planet per star system but I was able to just quickly make one naked star and another star with 3 planets and save the .galaxy file. Playability may be a little skewed, having a star without anything interesting to do in that system - but with this game the world (or universe) is your oyster!

About the planet editor; either its a bit broken or I'm not doing it right.

I'm trying to set some values using the "IfPlanetOwnerIsRace" command, and have run into two problems. An example of what I'm trying to do is assign little bonuses to planets by spawning goodies when a certain person captures it. So I click Psi in the race box and then pick a psi civilian research module and send it into the center list. Problem A: That module shows up no matter which race I pick, or if I then change the drop down box to "Always" instead of for a specific owner. I sigh, and try to get rid of it, and run into problem B: I can't get rid of anything. However, when I exit the edit menu by pressing "OK" and enter in again, everything is gone. So maybe the clear button works but doesn't update the UI. Which leads to problem C, which I just found when writing this: that box empties no matter what I do when I hit ok and then click edit again.

There's not a lot of info up about the builder yet, as far as specific values and such go; placing planets and phase lanes and etc are pie, its the settings and this menu that I'm fighting with.

About the planet editor; either its a bit broken or I'm not doing it right.

I was talking to Zoomba last night, and he mentioned that we're going to get a better system for doing this kind of stuff in a new Galaxy Forge version.

The one we have is great for just making maps, but it lacks any special cool stuff to do (can't do wormholes between star systems within Galaxy Forge, for example, and can't set up NPC Militia colonies, so on)

Alright, that makes sense. Just making a map with a cool shape doesn't appeal to me as much as actually designing an environment for players to interact with, so I guess I'll wait.

PS: If the functionality is there, is there some way to make it work "the hard way?" I don't mind a little work if I can get this stuff working. It just seems odd that the options are there but somehow unimplemented.

Some stuff is doable by editing the maps by hand in notepad - just open up a map file to see how it's set up. Earlier in this thread psugar (I believe) listed a map that has wormhole connections between solar systems, so you could open it up and see how it's done.

Things like Militias I haven't figured out how to do by hand

That said, there are better mapmakers than I, so they'll probably be able to help you more.

I'll take a look. The militia stuff seems straightforward, I have a feeling I could load up the planet and the stuff I select would be there. It's just the Boolean stuff that appears to be in the editor but possibly is not that frustrates me at the moment.

That's the tricky thing about militia - it's not anywhere in the map file. I specifically created a map with the in-game generator that had militia colonies and defenses, opened it up in galaxy forge, and there were no properties at all on any of those planets.

That makes me think it's not quite determined by the galaxy file itself

Those options have to be there for some reason! Because if not, the edit menu for the planets has exactly zero effect on the map, which doesn't make any sense.

EDIT: Maybe it is a conflict between the in-game generator and the Galaxy Forge itself. If the game is able to create random maps, and is able to excecute the "random" values you can set for planet spawns when it loads up the map, maybe it has its own set of code that automatically populates planets with whatever the default is, thus overriding the specifics of the galaxy map created with the Forge.

That said, still doesn't explain why some of the options don't work within the Forge itself, let alone when the map is loaded for actual play.

According to the post (I can't find it right now) this pertains to the local neutral planet militia's and not the big pirate bases. So I imagine setting this up in the upfront galaxy data (after description before "isFirstCapitalShipIsFlagship TRUE" sting will hopefully give you your Militia results.

Let me know if not or I should be testing tonight as well.

DO NOT do this! I know I saw this string on a modding topic somewhere before but that must be out of date. Putting in the string "hasStartingPlanetPirates FALSE" corrupted that galaxy file to where I was getting the black screen on start up and a mini-dump. Removing that string fixed my issue - so in my case that was the only problem.

I'm not sure if y'all were asking about this or had already figured it out, but you can brute-force adding ships to a local neutral militia like so:

open up the .galaxy file, find the planet def, which looks like this:

Code: html

planet

designName "Planet5"

inGameName ""

type "Desert"

pos [ 260 , 230 ]

owner ""

isHomePlanet FALSE

startingUpgradeLevelForPopulation 0

startingUpgradeLevelForCivilianModules 0

startingUpgradeLevelForTacticalModules 0

startingUpgradeLevelForArtifacts 0

planetItems

templateName ""

subTemplates 0

groups 1

group

condition

type "Always"

param ""

owner "Pirate"

colonizeChance 1

items 4

item "Tech:CapitalShip:BattleShip"

item "Tech:CapitalShip:Carrier"

item "Tech:CapitalShip:Colony"

item "Tech:CapitalShip:Siege"

spawnProbability 1.000000

useDefaultTemplate FALSE

and change it to something like this:

Code: html

planet

designName "Planet5"

inGameName ""

type "Desert"

pos [ 260 , 230 ]

owner ""

isHomePlanet FALSE

startingUpgradeLevelForPopulation 0

startingUpgradeLevelForCivilianModules 0

startingUpgradeLevelForTacticalModules 0

startingUpgradeLevelForArtifacts 0

planetItems

templateName ""

subTemplates 0

groups 1

group

condition

type "Always"

param ""

owner "Pirate"

colonizeChance 1

items 4

item "Tech:CapitalShip:BattleShip"

item "Tech:CapitalShip:Carrier"

item "Tech:CapitalShip:Colony"

item "Tech:CapitalShip:Siege"

spawnProbability 1.000000

useDefaultTemplate FALSE

Pity the scout who finds the planet with a Kol, Sova, Akkan, and Marza.

Edit: silly code blocks with white text on white background... just highlight the text to read it, I don't want to lose the tabs.

- also, these sorts of militia changes should be possible with the template system by defining new templates in C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\Sins of a Solar Empire\GameInfo\GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef and using them in the .galaxy file (or even through the Forge tool) , but my initial testing with that didn't do well.

Not what I had in mind, but workable. I assume theres def files that give us the reference names for each ship?

Also, maybe what I'm thinking is not even possible, so maybe a dev can comment on this and I just got a wrong impression, but I was going to try to make things appear when someone captured a planet; spoils of war, you could say. It's starting to look like these options are, in fact, only valid as starting options; "planetowner=x" is just a redundant way to reference whoever owns the planet in the beginning, which is possibly why I've been hitting errors.

Have mercy on people trying to post tabs-are-important text in code blocks, it takes like 10 edits to get it right the first time, and I can't edit it now that you've posted

Anyway, I'm glad it helped, if only a bit.

And I don't think you can have ships pop up on capture of planet, because that would require event scripting which isn't in the game (at least not very much of it). The tutorial is "scripted", and I'd really like to know (hint, hint, devs) if there's actually a scripting language behind that or if it's hard-coded. That may have been answered already.

My question is, can a map be made with 20 stars and 2-3 planets around each star?Or 50 stars with planets only around 1/3rd of them, so there would be a lot of plantless stars.

You can make a map that crashes your system. I tried one that was 15 starts with 20 planets each and it changed but there is no hard cap. The cap is the power of the system.

On the militia one you have to click off the use default template to use your made ones. But your right that's only for the 3 main races and pirates. Can't find away to mess with the "neutral colonies". I assume you mean the militias for pre-colonized planets?

Another question for Devs of GF. I noticed you can't add all ships and modules to templates (The Vas Phase Shifter comes to mind) there seems to be a few for each race. I think its 3 tactical modules and 2-3 ships (Cruisers). Is this intentional?

Examples:- Add Ships and structures- Undo-Button- Set Techtree for each race to make special techs available at start (e.g. the wormhole travel for all races)- more scripting and events (if x then do y)